Friday, December 7, 2012

Farms! Specifically, farms are in QA as we speak, and very
shortly will be heading to PTS so you guys can provide feedback before they go
live later in the month.

HOW THEY WORK: Farms are crafted through construction. There
are three levels of farms, 3 plot, 6 plot and 9 plot. The number of plots in
the farm determines how many seeds or cloning kits you can plant. Seeds (used
to grow plants) and cloning kits (used to grow animals) are crafted through
construction. Each farm has a farmhouse
attached, with the higher level farms having larger rooms and more amenities
including vaults, mailboxes and those super comfy couches.

Once crafted, Farms do have a few restrictions on where you
can place them. You’ll need a nice patch of mostly flat land that’s not too
close to another camp, player, node or hostile. Farms last for four hours, long
enough for several good harvests. You can also find or buy items that will
extend the life of your farm for up to three days as well as items that will
generate more produce from your farm or speed up the growing cycle.

Along with Farms we have a new set of vanity clothes
inspired by some of our favorite western movies and steampunk styles that we
think you guys will enjoy. These will be available inside a new lockbox, THE
DUSTY BOX.

Aaaand since it wouldn’t be the holidays without huge greedy
mutants rampaging through the wasteland! Tee Affo and Ninjanomicory have been
working on some world events with some new unique rewards, inspired by familiar
seasonal tropes.

Next Month:

Happy New Year!

We’ll be kicking things off by completing the effects revamp
and the next stage of the Coresuit. We’ve put some very rough drafts of the
effects changes on PTS and gotten a lot of amazing feedback. We’re going to
look at those numbers and what we want the Coresuit to do and make sure they
are working together the way we intend. There will be more iterations of these
effects changes and the Coresuits on the PTS starting in January. This is
something we really want everyone’s feedback on, so please keep an eye out for
PTS announcements!

And yes, when these changes hit live we will be sending out
respecs and Combat Knowledge Recalculators!

Q&A

Are there any other
player structures incoming any time soon?

So, we’ve talked about players housing on an off for many
years. We’re made no secret that it’s something that could be good for FE. It
is, however, a huge project from a
technical and artistic perspective. So rather than tackle the whole thing at
once we look at what the smaller components are what problems they present and
how to solve them. And sometimes we split them up into test projects- like
farms. So what does this mean for housing? It means we’re looking at what it
takes and how long it will take to get there and in the meantime we’re working
on the player made structures that won’t contain full blown resident
management, decoration etc. systems that might
be a piece of a later version of housing.

Any chance we will
get updates on mounts?

We’re introducing an update to a mount you may recognize for
our holiday event. You might have seen some pics of this on our Facebook page.

What are you looking
at with the effects changes?

We’re looking at everything and how it works together. Most
of the mutations are due for some type of modification. At this stage however
nothing is carved in stone.